Dogfooding NextGame: Building Nokia Games to Test Our Platform
Our strategy for becoming indie developers ourselves to understand the real challenges our platform needs to solve.
Announcing our dogfooding strategy: Building Nokia-style games to test our NextGame platform. We've built NextGame as a discovery platform for indie games. Now we're going to dogfood it by becoming indie developers ourselves.
The Dogfooding Strategy
Instead of just building features we think developers need, we're going to experience the indie game launch process firsthand by creating and launching our own games through the platform. Starting with RetroSnake - a Nokia-style Snake remake that we plan to build and launch within a week.
Why This Approach Matters
- **Real Developer Experience:** We'll face the same challenges as the indie developers we're building for
- **Authentic Data Collection:** Understanding what emotional responses different game styles actually create
- **Marketing Validation:** Testing whether our platform can actually help games get discovered
- **Speed Testing:** Proving that modern AI tools can enable rapid game development cycles
The Nokia Games Strategy
Nokia-era games like Snake, Space Impact, and Bounce created specific emotional responses - nostalgia, quick satisfaction, addictive gameplay loops.
By recreating these classics, we can:
- Test how our platform handles different game types
- Gather data on what makes games emotionally engaging
- Build marketing campaigns that drive platform awareness
- Demonstrate that quality games can be shipped quickly
Our Three Objectives
- **Emotional Metrics:** Understand what emotional responses games create so we can build better AI search and recommendations
- **Marketing Campaigns:** Use each game launch to bring attention to our platform and prove it works
- **Development Speed:** Show that web/Nokia-style games can be built and shipped in a week using modern AI development tools
What We're Building
RetroSnake (Week 1): Classic Snake gameplay to test nostalgia and quick-play mechanics Future games: Planning remakes of other Nokia classics to test different emotional patterns
The goal isn't just to build games - it's to become the kind of developers our platform serves, understand their real needs, and build solutions that actually work.
Each game becomes both a product and a case study for how indie developers can succeed using our discovery platform. This is building in public, dogfooding, and product development all rolled into one strategy.
Follow along as we test whether our platform can actually solve the indie game discovery problem - by trying to solve it for ourselves first.